Because Steve Jackson Games will not be putting Conspiracy Theory into distribution. It funded, and even hit stretch goals — but there apparently isn’t enough interest in it to justify a mass printing. So if you wanted it, you should probably hit Kickstarter within the next four hours. It closes at 6 PM EDT today, so there’s still a window.

Conspiracy Theory, for those who don’t remember, is a card game from Steve Jackson Games about, well, conspiracy theories:

This sort of thing is more or less firmly within SJG’s wheelhouse, and I have high hopes for it. Less than two weeks to go and still needs a couple more grand to fund, so if it sounds interesting, go ahead. I plan to break this out with my regular gaming group…

Early-bird supporters can get either five, three, or one buck off, depending on how quickly they hit that support button. Not that it would have mattered, in my case; I was determined to not back this puppy until at least the Dungeon Fantasy stuff was in the mail. …It went into the mail today, according to the message that I’ve just gotten. And the Munchkin Shakespeare stuff has shown up, just in time for me to give it as a present; so, well played, Steve Jackson Games. Well played.

Yeah, apparently the going theory among my super-genius counterparts on the Other Side is that Memories Pizza planned out ahead of time to get a bunch of semi-literate, provincial trash to scream death threats and foul language at them, just so the pizzeria could collect over $547K in two days in donations. I suppose that this is preferable to admitting that this specific Two-Minutes Hate spectacularly backfired*, but honestly? It’s not preferable by much. (more…)

It’s supposedly on Mars… well, I think that it’s just pixel noise in Google Earth: Mars, or whatever the technical term is. I just use the Magic Thinky Box; I don’t pretend to be a toolmaker. On the other hand, Google Earth looks interesting, so there’s that. Anyway, I figure that it’s not real, and that NASA can either release high-resolution photos of the area that won’t show it (thus proving that there’s a cover-up going on), or not have any high-resolution photos of the area (thus proving that there’s a cover-up going on). Note that there’s no actual way for NASA to prove that there’s not a cover-up going on; there never is.

Moe Lane

PS: If it was real NASA would have broadcast this to every corner of the world, coupled with an unsubtle request for some money, please*. Because we didn’t put it there – people are aware that getting payloads to orbit is not exactly a subtle exercise at our current level of technology, yes? – and even a government bureaucracy can recognize a hand-wrapped PR gift from God when it sees one.
*’Some’ being defined as ‘quite a lot of money, really.’

…Yeah. My favorite crazy phenomenon was the 100 mpg carburetor/cars that ran on water/’gas pill’ that the auto/oil companies supposedly suppressed, back in the day. ‘Back in the day’ being the 1970s, when the US Army would have paid any sum that you might have wanted for a truck with four to five times the range of the ones that they were using.